A job posting from Apple indicates that the company is seeking a senior engineer schooled in Hadoop to "design and build [a] scalable Hadoop based ETL infrastructure" for its mobile-advertising program, iAds, as first reported on The Register.

Hadoop is already drawing attention from enterprises across various industries for its ability to house and analyze vast amounts of data over distributed computing environments -- aka the cloud. The framework uses MapReduce to spread out the data processing over a massive numbers of servers, then combines the results. Observers have declared Hadoop a killer application for the cloud.

Yahoo's application of Hadoop has already made a mark in the world of research and academia: The company has opened up the facility for big data research to eight universities across the United States. Recently, a team of Yahoo researchers used the company cloud to set a new record in the field of mathematics by creating the longest version of pi to date.

Other users include eBay, which is building an 8,500-processor 16-petabyte Hadoop cluster; the New York Times, which uses the platform for tasks such as batch processing of huge volumes of image data, as well as text analytics and data mining; and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.